Monday, September 07, 2020

Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing

 It would be hard to name a more divisive figure on the Australian pop culture radar at the moment than the dethroned television celebrity chef and reality show judge turned anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-sunscreen, anti-government, anti-media, COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Pete Evans.

While many have visions of Evans running about naked in his teepee on his Byron Bay sanctuary scoffing activated almonds and wearing an aluminium foil hat to evade any nasty 5G rays, there are those who still take him seriously.

All's fair in conspiracy land as Alan Jones jumps on air with Pete Evans


Emma Copley Eisenberg in EsquireFact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing. Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It? An interesting, surprising look at how fact-checking works. “Fact checking is a comprehensive process in which, according to the definitive book on the subject, a trained checker does the following: “Read for accuracy”; “Research the facts”; “Assess sources: people, newspapers and magazines, books, the Internet, etc”; “Check quotations”; and “Look out for and avoid plagiarism.” Though I had worked as a fact checker in two small newsrooms, did I trust myself to do the exhaustive and detailed work of checking my own nonfiction book? I did not. From reading up on the subject and talking to friends who had published books of nonfiction, I knew that I would be responsible for hiring and paying a freelance fact checker myself. This is the norm, not the exception; in almost all book contracts, it is the writer’s legal responsibility, not the publisher’s, to deliver a factually accurate text.  As a result, most nonfiction books are not fact checked; if they are, it is at the author’s expense. Publishers have said for years that it would be cost-prohibitive for them to provide fact checking for every nonfiction book; they tend to speak publicly about a book’s facts only if a book includes errors that lead to a public scandal and threaten their bottom line. Recent controversies over books containing factual errors by Jill AbramsonNaomi Wolf, and, further back, James Frey, come to mind…”




 Data/ Mining Data on the Internet 2020– Data mining is a constantly evolving discipline applied in many fields including finance, law, healthcare, marketing, science and engineering, the retail industry, telecommunications, social media, and government. This guide by Marcus P. Zillmanencompasses free, fee based and consultancy related sources to assist info pros, researchers, data analysts, knowledge managers and CI/BI experts to effectively identify, analyze and apply reliable, value added data within the scope of their respective work products.